IMS Green: Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency (MEDEM)

Our research

The notion of climate and ecological emergency is situated at a complex nexus between

• a) demands for action from scientists, activists and others.
• b) more symbolic declarations by, for example, municipalities, governments, parts of the industrial sector or universities.
• c) its direct impact on the material, social and cultural spheres we collectively inhabit.

However, climate emergency, as declared in different contexts, tend to hold little legal or statutory weight, and whereas specific crises manifested as consequences of climate and ecological emergency (wildfires, droughts, floods, etc.) May indeed be treated as localized states of emergency, the overarching complex of systemic interdependencies and urgencies signalled by climate and ecological emergency is often obscured alongside issues to do with its unequal impacts and demands for climate justice. Thus, the radical character of and the transformative agencies called for by climate and ecological emergency risk being lost, resulting in a lack of collective agency and action.

Medem proposes that the gravity of this lack of agency urges forth a paradigm shift across ecological, socio-cultural, artistic, political, and scientific domains. Taking such paradigm shift as a point of departure, medem focuses on the interrelations between current expertise regarding the causes and impacts of the climate emergency, its mediation, and the construction of cross-sectorial, multifaceted spaces for action and agency. From this vantage point, it seeks to critically map out existing knowledges and articulations of the climate and ecological emergency exploring its current epistemological and political status, and furthermore, develop new transdisciplinary, transversal conceptual frameworks and collaborative, project-based models enabling climate emergency to be translated into climate agency.

This approach includes an operative notion of mediation. It is our contention that the climate and ecological emergency is, in part, media-borne; that is, the ways in which it is rendered sensorial, intelligible and imaginable is through complex processes of mediation operating intermedially in and between diverse media types. Our intentions and working processes thus derive from a wide range of disciplines and approaches, primarily within the arts and humanities, including intermedial studies and intermedial ecocriticism, art and design (including artistic research), and a wide array of critical theoretical frameworks while seeking to foster solid relationships to related approaches within the natural and social sciences. 

Education

Within MEDEM we are developing educational packages at master’s level dealing with climate and ecological emergency and its mediations. In the master’s course climate emergency studies, we take on issues of the emergency that we are in and create concrete as well as more speculative responses to the climate crisis. In the master’s course intermedial ecocriticism, mediations of the climate and ecological emergency are investigated in aesthetic as well as non-aesthetic media types.